Finch Lane Gallery

Finch Lane Gallery

The Salt Lake City Arts Council, located in Reservoir Park, programs visual arts exhibits year-round in the Finch Lane Gallery. Artist are invited to apply for exhibits annually. Typically, the applications are made available in January and due back to the Arts Council in March.

The exhibition program is designed to give local artists an opportunity to show their current body of work. The application process includes a thorough and competitive review by the Visual Arts Committee of the Salt Lake City Arts Council, with members from the board of directors and visual artists from the community.

Both one-person shows and group exhibits are considered. The quality of work, as evidenced by images of previous work submitted with the application, a range of styles and media, and a balanced exhibition season are among the criteria considered in the application review process.

2019 CALL FOR ENTRIES

FINCH LANE GALLERY

The Finch Lane Gallery is seeking submissions for our 2019 Call for Entries. This call is open to all Utah artists. The application will be available February 7 at www.youjudgeit.org/saltlakecityartscouncil. There is no fee to apply. Artists who have had solo exhibitions within the last three years are not eligible to apply.

Deadline to apply is April 23, 2018

A question and answer session, open to all applicants, will be held on Saturday, March 24 from 10:00-11:00 at the Finch Lane Gallery.

FINCH LANE GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

Square One: Helper Artists of Utah

January 12 through February 23

Once an abandoned mining town, Helper, Utah is now a thriving art community. The success of Helper was an unintended consequence of the desire of a number of educators, led by art professors David Dornan and Paul Davis, who found that the lonely town offered not only the solitude they needed for creativity in their own work, but affordable space to teach serious art students the fundamentals of drawing and painting contemporary realism. Armed with the mantra, “learn your craft,” the Helper school opened in the spring of 1995. The school’s teachers didn’t just tell students how to paint, they showed them how to paint. Dornan noted “…if a student wants to paint a better apple, show them how to paint a better apple, don’t start talking about the relevance of an apple.” For Paul Davis, the school offered space for clarity, “after a while it got so that you could see what a student was thinking while looking at their drawing or painting, then you could help them to understand that the problem had nothing to do with mere talent, but that the issue was more about the way in which they focused their minds.”

The lesson they hoped to teach students is that draftsmanship along with extended periods of immersion in one’s craft are among the fundamental building blocks for creativity. This exhibition examines the work of a number of extraordinary artists who studied at the Helper school and who attribute their level of artistry and success to the generosity and talent of its teachers. These distinguished artists sell work throughout the country, some directly from their studios in Helper. While they share the lineage of their craft, with slight and subtle veins of thematic and stylistic similarities, each has a distinct style.